How Can You Tell?

How often have you read in a book review a comment on the use of, or presence of, an "Unreliable Narrator"?  Whenever I have encountered a reviewer commenting on the presence of an unreliable narrator, I feel that the implication is that most narrators are reliable - or, at least, the reader is entitled to expect the narrator to be reliable. 

We as readers seem to expect the fiction we read to make sense - to have a logically connected beginnning, middle, and end.  Indeed, most readers would be disappointed if there were not some sort of moral to the story.  How often have you seen criticism heaped upon the head of an author who has left the reader too far "up in the air" with no promise of a sequel to tidy up the loose ends?  We only tend to suspect unreliability in the narrator if the author drops some clues into the story that point us in that direction.  But, in real life, how reliable is any narrator?

There is an abundance of scientific research that explains why this is so; our minds actively seek patterns, relationships, and causation in the world around us, including our leisure reading activities.  The willing suspension of disbelief can be shattered when too much of the story just does not make sense to us.

There is also, however, a plethora of research that shows just how unreliable any narrator - including ourselves - can be.  Memory is plastic, our minds can never cope with all the data coming in at any given moment, and must selectively filter and focus on a part of that data, excluding or pushing to one side the rest of it.

Police, for example know this, and understand that different witnesses to an event will give different accounts - and will often feel quite certain of the accuracy of their account.  Lawyers know it too, and take advantage of it in court by pretending that the jury should believe that any conflict in the evidence is proof that it is false and misleading - yet those same lawyers, if they detect too high a level of consistency between the evidence, say, of two police, will immediately pounce with accusations of collusion in, and fabrication of, said evidence.  In both instances, the lawyers may or may not be right, but how is the poor jury to know?

In real life, we know, or should know, that someone telling us a story may or may not be reliable, and that we may need to draw on extra resources to assess the accuracy of facts or opinions offered to us.

Do we have a rational way of determining the reliability of that narrator? Probably not - most humans seem to rely on a mix of prejudices, learned experiences, and ancient instincts to judge the reliability of a narrator, and we often, to our cost, get it wrong.

We, individually, and in groups, build our own story on the stories we have seen and heard and - to some degree or another - believed.  Are all those story building-blocks reliable?  Is our input into the story reliable?  Are our memories reliable?  Confused?

Good - when we are writing fiction, we need to keep this in mind; it is highly unlikely that any of our characters are telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.  It is equally likely that other characters will be listening through their own set of filters, interpreting the protagonist's words and actions differently than the protagonist intended. 

A good example of this would be Muriel Barbery's book Gourmet Rhapsody.  Each chapter is short; most are narrated by the main character - the famous food critic - while the rest are narrated by various people (and animals) who were, to a greater or lesser extent, part of his life.  There is overlap, and there are contradiction - each narrator seems to be sincere; so who does the reader believe?

I could not say how many times I have worked behind a bar, filling glasses, wiping spilt beer, and observing as a story is told and re-told over a space of hours; watching it grow and change with each repeating, until the gap between the first edition and the last is so great that it would be hard to believe that they were about the same incident - only the names of the people and places involved are the same - mostly. 

And yet, if challenged, the teller at the end would usually be as certain of the accuracy of that account as he or she had been about the first version.  And as for the version I hear the next day, after the story has been taken home to new audiences, re-told, embellished, polished, and re-presented, even the names have started to change by then.

So, let your characters lie, exaggerate, conceal, contradict, omit, forget, mis-speak, mis-interpret, and misunderstand; after all, they are only human.

Stories and the tribes that listen to them

On the NeuroLogica Blog I encountered a discussion titled "Tribal Epistemology" - by Steven Novella - and was immediately fascinated.  The author describes the evolution of his studies into the willingness of people to believe in pseudoscience; from his initial hypothesis that scientific illiteracy was the cause, through the idea that a lack of critical thinking skills was to blame, to his current position - that narrative or tribal thinking is to blame.

Steven's post is worth reading, from a writer's point of view - though it is not an optimistic reading of the current world situation as seen by a scientist with real concerns about the direction we are being taken by the various forms of illiteracy and poor thinking skills that have infested public life.

As someone trained in the scientific method, with its emphasis on identifying and confirming facts, no matter how much those facts might conflict with ones own current understanding or personally held beliefs, it must be hard to come to grips with the idea that humans will so willingly set aside facts that conflict with their own pre-existing beliefs.

Authors, poets, playwrights, and storytellers have long known this truth about humans, though.  A great story, well told, can change belief in the audience. But authors beware if, in the hope of inflicting your own beliefs on others, you present your reader with a thinly disguised moral or political lecture. An audience seeking entertainment will almost certainly see through a thin plot and poor characterisation to the moralising within, and is unlikely to put up with it.

Story tellers will recognise that the reader desires a story that they can believe, even as they understand that the story is made up.  Fiction writers take the reality they have experienced and observed and rework it - taking what can be a chaotic and apparently unconnected collection of facts and weaving the material into a tale with continuity, meaning, and value for the reader.  Is this not what we have been doing with the world around us for so many millennia - trying to reduce a vast mass of incoming data to a manageable and meaningful narrative?

Of course, the snake-oil salesman and the charlatans have long known how to spin a tale the audience is willing to believe - without such a skill they would be broke, and would be run out of town in very short order.  And there, as in so many other areas of human expertise, is the trap.  Just as our ability to manage and control sharp edges, fire, chemical reactions, and so many other things, has given us wealth and comfort and safety, so have those same skills brought us pain, misery, and death.

Our skill with, and love of, narrative is as much of a two-edged sword as any box of matches or sharp knife can be. Stories can give us a sense of right and wrong, a feeling of community with our fellow humans, and a body of lore that will help us and our children to live well in the world - or they can twist our understanding of reality in ways that can ruin that same world.

Why do people fall for the wrong stories?  I wonder if it is because we have, as a species, a natural inclination to do enough to get comfortable, but not too much more?  If we have collected enough stories to make a comfortable narrative for ourselves, and have found a comfortable tribe to be with - one whose members share that same narrative - why make ourselves uncomfortable by looking too closely into stories that might invalidate that narrative?

Or is it simply because every society has its own version of the warning "curiosity killed the cat"?

We know from observation that babies and small children are determined in their curiosity.

Everything is interesting to babies and toddlers.  Before they can talk or walk, and often for a long time after they can, everything is picked up and examined. Each new object is tested with every means at their disposal, including biting, pulling, and tossing.  Why does that curiosity fade?  Is it, as some people suggest, that adults and the education system somehow crush it through the imposition of uniformity and regulation?  Could it be that most humans reach a point where the facts they have collected are "good enough" to form a world view?  That once a satisfactory narrative has been composed, the natural inclination for many is to "leave well enough alone"?

It is possible - how often do we see people who have been resistant to the "facts" of others suddenly shaken out of their old world view by some personal encounter with disaster?  We see their horror as a comfortable old narrative is suddenly shattered by events, and beliefs held as certain collide with unexpected reality.

Is that not the goal of the song writer, the poet, and the author - to string together words that jolt people with new facts and feelings, that shake them from comfort into confusion and excitement, to open eyes and ears to possibilities  that are present but have been ignored? 

Where does it Come From?

We draw material for our stories from the world, and the lives we see and hear around us - both the ones that are physically close to us, and those brought close by that two-edged sword that is modern technology.

Old farts such as myself can be fond of reminding younger people that "the human race got by for thousands of years without mobile phones, televisions, and the internet" but we can find ourselves just as thoroughly reliant on the constant, flickering flow of information and opinion as any of the generations younger than us.

While that flow of story can provide us with prompts, information, and inspiration for our own creative work, it can also overwhelm us - especially when that flow seems to be a tsunami of tragedy, and ominous behaviour and utterances from those who claim to be leading us to a better future.

It can be hard to write something in an upbeat tone when the media is full of the droning mendacity of politicians who are busily doing nothing while trying still to look competent, effective, and worthy of re-election.  It can be even harder when the various media are full of the posturing of nuclear armed bully boys.  Hope and optimism can be difficult things to find on days like that.

It is enough to send you back for another look at On The Beach, or The Earth Abides.  There is plenty of dystopian and apocalyptic literature around, full of action and drama featuring heroism or technological miracles that ultimately lead to some form of salvation and renewal for the human race.  These two old novels, however, are more likely to be true to life - a brief, dramatic disaster caused by human agency, followed by a slow and painful decline for the survivors.  At least George R. Stewart allowed nature to survive - indeed, to thrive - as humanity faded from the scene, and he did allow a glimmer of hope for homo sapiens towards the end of the novel.

Perhaps I need to throw myself back into the escapist fantasy of my youth, by authors like Asimov, Tolkien, Ransome, and Heinlein.  Or, maybe I should be re-reading my Scouting for Boys before heading out into the backyard to practice my survival skills.

Out there, I will be among the trees and gardens, surrounded by the sounds of running water, windblown leaves, and birds of all sorts - and the Scout's guide book won't be so necessary after all.  I will be instantly reminded of the good in the world.  It must be time to turn off the news and listen to life again, for whenever I do so, I find life not only persisting, but flourishing. In the recent winter warmth my ear was pulled along by a familiar buzz until it brought me to the rosemary bushes by the letter box - where I found lots of these little folk, out in numbers quite unexpected for a winter's day.

I wonder where their hive is - rosemary honey would surely be wonderful, fresh from the comb.  Incidentally, if you are a drinker of green tea, it is worth brewing a pot with a pinch of rosemary leaves, fresh from the bush - fresh plucked thyme is also a lovely addition.